Fear of the Unknown
by SETI-fan
Summary: My take on the rise and fall of the tempestuous friendship between Bubblegum and Marceline before the events of Adventure Time. Why did these two contrasting personalities take an interest in each other and what then drove them apart? (PB's point of view)


**I decided to take a stab at Bubblegum and Marceline's relationship before the time frame of Adventure Time (how it came to be, what it was like, why they fell out). I know it's been done ad nauseum, but based on the fact that Marcy didn't know PB slept in her shirt, I wanted to play with the idea that they weren't actually a couple back then, although perhaps mostly due to a lack of communication. (Those two would never make things simple. That's part of why they're so fascinating as a pairing.) This also lets me take the fragments of several fics I've started but never finished and make them part of one bigger narrative. Not sure how long this series will end up being, but I have at least five chapters already in mind.**

* * *

Bonnibel was beginning to suspect this meeting was not going to be nearly as fun as she'd imagined.

Her presence on this trip had caused a bit of disagreement between her parents that morning.

"She's only fourteen," her mother had protested. "She should be playing and doing her schoolwork, not listening to you all talking politics."

"She's going to be ruling this kingdom one day, so she might as well start learning what that involves now," her father returned.

"She'll have all her life to worry and fuss over the kingdom. Why should we shorten what childhood she has?"

"Would you rather dump all her lessons on her the day after her eighteenth birthday instead of spreading it out gradually over the years?"

In the end, they decided to leave the decision up to Bonnibel herself. The opportunity to assist her father at his work and start living up to her title as princess of the Candy Kingdom had been too enticing to resist, and so, despite her mother's concerns, Bonnibel had chosen to accompany her father to the Annual Meeting of Royal Updates.

She had listened carefully as he instructed her on how to behave in front of the other royals and beamed when he entrusted her to keep his papers in order and pass them to him as needed throughout the meeting. She had tried to read some of them to better participate or anticipate his needs, but much of the wording was beyond her as it pertained more to political topics than scientific ones. Still, she did her best and spent the carriage ride to the Royal Congressional Hall asking her father about his talking points for the meeting.

As he explained it, while true diplomatic conferences were an extremely rare event in Ooo, it was customary for representatives of each royal family to meet once a year to present to each other the state of their kingdoms, seek any assistance or advice they might need, and generally reinforce connections and relationships between all the realms of Ooo. While not all kingdoms were specifically allies of each other, it was wise to stay aware of what each other was doing. The actions of one kingdom could affect them all, and isolated, secretive factions had greater potential to cause trouble than ones who stayed socially involved.

When they arrived, the Hall was filled with beings as diverse as the regions of Ooo, but alike in one facet: they were all significantly older than Bonnibel. Some she remembered from various functions at her family's castle or visits to other kingdoms. Others were complete strangers to her. She minded her manners, greeting each of the other royals politely and graciously accepting their compliments, even as she grew tired of hearing how much she had grown since they had seen her last. She never understood why that seemed to surprise adults so much. Wouldn't it be more anomalous if a child failed to grow despite time passing?

The reunions and small-talk began to wrap up and the various kings, queens, princes, and princesses of Ooo diffused around the room to their places at the large wooden table in the center. Bonnibel settled into a seat beside her father, placing the stack of papers carefully on the polished wood, but never taking her hands off them.

She heard a gasp of shock and a shuffling chairs pushing back as people stood up abruptly. Tearing her eyes from her assigned charge, Bonnibel looked up and followed the alarmed gazes to the doorway of the Hall. Her father grabbed her arm and pulled her behind his back, but she tried to peek around his side to get a glimpse of the sudden danger.

"Who are you?" Turtle King snapped at a figure standing in the doorway. "What are you doing here?"

"This is the meeting of Ooo royalty, right?"

Bonnibel was a bit surprised. The voice was female and sounded fairly young. Older than her own, but not yet deepened by maturity. She managed to lean around her father and through a gap in the crowd saw that the new arrival was a humanoid woman with long black hair and skin as pale as the bark of a cotton candy tree.

"It is," Lumpy Space King rumbled reluctantly.

"Coolio." The woman grinned, flashing an extended set of canines. "This place is a pain to find. Seriously, who builds a meeting place on top of a mountain that's always surrounded by fog? Trying to keep the jerkier kings away?"

"If we were, clearly it isn't working," Bonnibel's father said coldly. She stared up at him, startled to hear such a tone come from him, especially in the presence of other royalty. "It's been decades since anyone has heard from the Vampire King. If you are here to announce a new wave of attacks on our kingdoms, you will have to face all of us as a united front."

A few other monarchs chorused "Hear, hear" around the table. Bonnibel tried to get a better look, intrigued to see an actual vampire in person. Until now, she had only read about such creatures in passing.

The woman snorted, a very un-monster-like sound. "Please. You guys didn't hear? The Vampire King's long dead. I'm Marceline, the new Vampire Queen. I heard this was a meeting was for all the kings and queens, so..."

"How do we know this isn't a trick?"

"Well, I'd have brought you the head of the Vampire King, but it kind of turned to dust with the rest of him, so…" she shrugged. When they continued glaring at her, she rolled her eyes. "Look, I'm trusting you all not to stake me just for showing up. Can't you just give me a chance to prove the new boss isn't the same as the old boss?"

There was some grumbling around the table, but Muscle Princess piped up, "Oh, just let her stay so we can get this meeting over with. We outnumber her anyway and I think we can handle one vampire." She flexed her massive arms as a reminder.

"Thanks, MP," the woman replied cheerfully. She sprang into the air, floating over the table, and coming to rest in an empty seat diagonally across from where Bonnibel and her father were sitting. As she slumped back in the chair, casually pulling out a notepad and pen as if oblivious to the wary looks of the others, Bonnibel finally got to see the self-proclaimed Vampire Queen clearly. Her face matched her voice, still a bit rounded with adolescence, her expression carrying the slight edge of boredom that Bonnibel associated with those in their teens. She really looked more of a princess than the woman her rank would imply. How had she become ruler of a kingdom so young?

Then Bonnibel's eyes fell on the fangs that extended from beneath her upper lip and remembered what kind of creature she was really looking at. How many victims had those fangs drained of blood? To rule a kingdom of monsters, how vicious did this woman have to be?

Assessing her with more cautious eyes, Bonnibel noted that her clothing was anything but regal: a set of frayed cargo pants, heavy tan boots, and a tank top. She hadn't dressed to show any respect for her fellow royalty. No crown adorned her brow, no symbol of her supposed rank. Even her demeanor indicated laziness and carelessness rather than dignity and authority. Still, Bonnibel found herself watching the older girl's hair as it settled around her in the chair. The long locks should have been impractical and uncomfortable to drag around unbraided, but they seemed to move and shift weightlessly, as if they were a cloud that followed her around.

Bonnibel's attention returned to her task as the other royalty took their own seats again and tried to get back to business. She looked up at her father to see him intently focusing on Turtle King's opening statements, so she started double-checking the stack of papers to make sure they were in the order he would need them.

As Turtle King wrapped up, each royal around the table got a turn to give a State of the Realm update for the others. Bonnibel sat upright and alert, focusing on each one and watching her father take notes on anything that might affect their kingdom and its trading relationships. She tried to make notes of her own too, seeing if she wrote the same thing as her father.

After about the sixth repetitive and verbose speech, though, Bonnibel found her attention starting to fade. From what she could follow, none of the complaints were anything of interest outside of their own kingdoms. The majority of their "news" amounted to little more than local gossip among their dukes, earls, and other nobles, none of whom she knew. Her notes got shorter and she soon found herself doodling equations and schematics in the margins instead.

She glanced up at one point and noticed the vampire woman leaning her head on one fist, eyes similarly glazed over. She caught Bonnibel looking at her, grinned slightly, and mimed a talking mouth with her free hand as she rolled her eyes.

Bonnibel flushed and straightened up again, refocusing her attention on the current speaker and making a point of not looking the vampire's way again.

"…which is creating some tensions between the runny and syrupy portions of the population. So in the coming year, a conversation will be necessary on whether viscosity is inborn or a product of your environment, which should make things interesting," Slime Princess finished, chuckling.

Turtle King nodded sagely. "I can imagine. Next we shall hear from Vampire Queen."

"Just Marceline," the girl spoke up, stretching in her chair. "I know y'all like using the titles and that's cool, but I've been Marceline way longer than I've been the queen."

"Very well." Turtle King seemed slightly put out by this break in protocol. "Marceline shall fill us in on the state of vampire affairs."

"All right." Marceline ticked things off on her fingers. "Old business? That'd be the Vampire King. New business? That's me. Things were kind of messy for a while, but the other vamps are getting chiller with me being in charge, so things should be cool now."

She sat back. The others waited.

"That's it?" Lumpy Space King asked.

She shrugged. "Yeah. Oh!" She snapped her fingers. "And vampires don't drink blood anymore."

This caused an uproar of dubious comments from the other royalty until Turtle King had to bang his gavel on the podium.

"You expect us to believe that?" Jungle Princess demanded.

"Isn't that sort of what makes you a vampire?" asked Raggedy Princess.

"We figured out we can just eat the color red instead. Seriously!" she insisted when the royals snorted again.

"How can red substitute for blood?" Bonnibel's father asked. She was glad to hear him voice the same question that had filled her own head.

"I don't know, but it works." Over the mutters she added, "Hey! How many vampire attacks have there been since I took over?"

Bonnibel knew there hadn't been any within her lifetime. She had suspected that vampires were merely old myths or folk legends until today.

"You don't drink any blood at all?" Turtle King challenged.

Marceline waved a hand, hemming slightly. "Well, I figured it was okay to drink blood from Evil creatures if they had to."

A knowing rumble went around the room.

"But only if they're actually Evil!" Marceline protested.

"How do you decide who's Evil or not?" asked Turtle King.

She glared up at him. "Probably the same way you do."

"He means, how can a vampire be trusted to judge Good from Evil?" Lumpy Space King huffed.

Marceline's eyes had narrowed to slits that reminded Bonnibel of a cat right before it extends its claws to slash. "I think the old saying is 'It takes one to know one.'"

"Very well," Turtle King banged his gavel as a warning to break it up. "We will take the Vampire Queen's word until proven otherwise. Now, let's move on to Skeleton Princess…"

Bonnibel expected the vampire to start a fight anyway or storm out, but instead the girl just leaned back in the chair again, looking sullen. She didn't take any more notes that meeting or interact with anyone else.

Bonnibel resumed listening to the remaining speakers and provided her father with the documents he needed, but she kept finding her mind wandering to how it was biologically possible for the color red to replace blood.

When the meeting wrapped up, the Vampire Queen left without another word, disappearing into the night from whence she'd come. As Bonnibel and her father left, he hustled her into the covered carriage and continued looking out the windows as they rode home.

"I'm sorry I brought you to the meeting this year," he said eventually.

Her heart clenched with shame. "I know I got bored and I stopped paying attention. I'm sorry. I'll do better in the future—"

His head turned quickly to her, eyes apologetic. "No, sweetheart, you were perfect. I couldn't be prouder of you. But I put you at unnecessary risk. Things could have gone very badly tonight if the Vampire Queen had reacted differently."

"Oh." Bonnibel thought about the tense moments that evening. "It's good she's not as bad as most vampires."

Her father chuckled darkly. "No, Bonnibel, she's far more dangerous. The old Vampire King was brutal and savage, but this one is smart."

"She is?" Bonnibel frowned. Nothing about the vampire's actions suggested higher cognitive ability to her.

Her father leaned forward, his mood shifting to his familiar Teaching Mode. "She attended this meeting, which her predecessors never have. What does that tell us?"

Bonnibel considered her answers carefully. "She wants to interact with the other kingdoms, to be part of the community of Ooo."

"And she stopped her people from drinking blood, if she is telling the truth. Or at least drinking blood from 'non-evil' beings. Why would a vampire do that?"

She pondered that. There was no gain to the individual vampire; blood was guaranteed to work and was likely plentiful. Discovering that red worked was a gamble, so there had to be some reward or cost great enough to make it necessary to seek an alternative. Also, requiring her people to do the same could not have been a popular decision, so it had to be worth fighting her own people rather than representing their desires. Of course, ruling meant doing what was right for your people's well-being, not what was popular…

"Stopping the blood-drinking somehow made things better for the vampires," Bonnibel said, thinking out loud. "But she only stopped them from feeding on the Good. Because none of us would care if they were killing Evil creatures. But if a vampire killed anyone from our kingdoms, we would hunt them down."

"And there are no guarantees we would only punish the one responsible," her father agreed.

"But that just sounds like a good policy for everyone. Why is it dangerous?"

"It is good if she honors it. But it could also be a trick to get us to let our guard down. Vampires are notoriously tricky and manipulative, and to have become queen she must be even craftier than most. All of these changes are things that would make her more popular with the rest of us. She wants to get close to us, be welcomed into our world, and then, once we've forgotten that vampires were a threat…we shall see."

He sat back again, settling in more comfortably for the trip. "We'll keep a close eye on her activities from here out. Perhaps she will turn out to be honorable. But remember, Bonnibel: trust is never given freely; only earned. Otherwise you are setting yourself up for betrayal at every turn."

Bonnibel nodded. It all made sense, of course, but it still sat oddly in her chest. "So how do I tell which behaviors are good things for our kingdom and which are actually hidden threats?"

He smiled at her, slightly bitterly. "Welcome to the world of politics, my love. In times of doubt, it is best to look to precedent for guidance. And throughout history, interactions with vampires have never been good."

She leaned against the door of the carriage, musing on these lessons. As the night drifted past, she realized there were far more dangers in the world than she had realized only hours before.


End file.
